Welcome!
Welcome to my personal web page which is devoted (for the most part) to Linguistics and my work as a linguist. I’m currently ABD at Stony Brook University, dissertating on the topic “Quantifier Scope and Prosodic Effects in Russian”.
The dissertation has two parts (which is ambitious, but hopefully doable). The theoretical part is on the syntax/semantics of Quantification in Russian in which I look at how certain properties of Russian (such as permutations of word order, aka Scrambling) interact with quantifier scope; I also use quantifier scope as a diagnostic to find out more about the syntax of Russian, for instance, I use it to probe into the structure of Russian ditransitive VP. In the experimental part I’m trying to establish how the prosody of quantificational sentences in Russian affects their semantics. Specifically, I’m arguing that the way semantically ambiguous doubly quantified sentences are realized prosodically can bias for or against a particular interpretation of the sentence, and thus provide disambiguation. This, I believe, can explain at least in part why many people believe Russian quantificational sentences to be scope-frozen, or unambiguous.
In August 2009 I’ll be leaving the much loved New York to teach Linguistics at Reed College, Portland, which is a dream come true. You can find out more about Reed Linguistics here.
The website is brand new and so many of the categories are still empty, but they’ll be filling up as I go along. If you are interested in my research, please contact me and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it. If you are a native speaker of Russian or Ukrainian (which I recently started working on) and would like to participate in a fun psycholinguistic experiment, do email me, I’m always looking for more subjects.
 |
 |
 |
